Who spilled the rainbow?

Who turned it upside down?

Now all the colours

Are messed up on the ground.

It must have been some silly bird

Not watching where it flew –

It brought the rainbow

Crashing down

In a shower of goo.

I saw the erky-perky bird
flying through the sky.
I saw the erky-perky bird
had only got one eye.

It did an erky-perky from  
high up in the sky.
But when it circled back again,
I saw its second eye!

The moral of the story's clear:
Do not be misled.
The erky-perky bird has 
eyes both sides its head.   

by J. Brydon Stewart

Of all the living creatures yet found,

In the air, the sea or the ground.

There are none quite like the worm.

They squiggle and they squirm.

They live in the earth.

For what it’s worth.

I like them…

On toast.

Yum!

Over two billion years
back in the past
the Earth’s like a snowball
with frozen white crusts.

The carbon dioxide
levels were low
which made our world colder
and covered in snow.

Life had evolved as
small single cells.
But many would die
as the temperatures fell.

Since some could survive
that long glacier spell,
could other ice worlds
hide life-forms as well?

First published in Double Helix (Jul 2016)

Reproduced with permission of CSIRO

www.doublehelix.csiro.au